Expiration Dates?

[Ghoulish Delight]

It could simply be a change in the FDA regulations for what can be printed as the shelf life.

Other than perhaps milk/cream (perhaps), I don't pay a whole lot of attention to expiration dates. And even for the few things I do pay attention to, I only do so in a relative sense (i.e., this carton of whipping cream is 2 days newer than this carton) rather than caring how far out the particular date is. Expiration dates are 1) approximations and 2) more often "sell by" dates than expiration meant to provide a borderline that gives as close to 0% chance that any individual product hasn't gone bad yet. That doesn't mean (and I know you know this) that those things go bad at midnight of the day printed on the container. It just means that after that date there is no longer a 0% chance of age-related spoilage. What that non-zero chance is depends on how it's stored (or fridge, for instance, is downright magical and keeps eggs for literally a couple months just fine)

Have you been noticing things actually going bad faster, or have you just been assuming so based on the dates?